Do you or your ancestors have a surname spelt like
one of the names above?

Whether you do or don't, welcome to my Bodimeade One-Name
Study webpages. This is the place where
I am making some of my genealogical information available to the world.
Please browse and let me know if you are interested in the Bodimeades
documented here.

Andrew Millard

About this website

These webpages provide access to information that I have been
collecting about people with the surname Bodimeade for about 20 years
(on and off). My research started with the history of my grandmother's
family, but I rapidly discovered that there were very few Bodimeade's.
Soon I came across a difficulty in tracing the parents of my
great-great-great-grandfather, Joseph Bodimeade, as he does not appear
to have been christened, so I started to collect as much information as
I could about possible collateral relatives. Even after I solved the
problem of Joseph's parents I continued collecting information, and it
grew into a one-name study. I hope to present the majority of the data
and family reconstructions I have made, and continue to make, here.

The primary resource here is the
database of linked family information, but lists of
transcribed information
are slowly coming as well. Be warned! Although most of the data is
correct, the database will contain errors in
transcription and in association of events to a person. If you find
any please let me know. The publically accessible part of the database
limits access to information about people known to be alive, and those
without an identified death record who are less than 100 years since the
first known event in their life. Access to this information is password
protected, and will be made available only to Bodimeade descendants, who
will
then have access to the names of all living people and more detailed
information about their own relatives up to their second cousins.
Please contact me if you need such access.

The family groups page gives
very brief information about the family groups listed in the database
and outlines some of the outstanding questions and
research tasks for each one.

Some notes on the surname

Spelling variations

Throughout the website I adopt the spelling Bodimeade as it is the
majority spelling today and has been the majority spelling used by
literate bearers of the name since the early 18th century. The
ONS Database of extant surnames with more than five bearers, shows
that in September 2003 as well as Bodimeade (223 people) the other
variants
in Britain today are Bodimead (18 people) and Bodemeaid (18 people).
That makes the spelling Bodimeade the 19,870th most common of the
270,000 surnames in Britain today. A search I made of the British
telephone directories in 1985 gives a similar picture, but adds a few
more spellings: Bodemead 1; Bodemeaid 3; Bodimead 2; Bodimeade 46;
Bodymede 1. However, the spelling has varied widely in the past and the
title bar gives a selection of spellings I have come across, although
some of them are merely transcription errors. In the late 16th to early
18th centuries it was not uncommon for people who wrote their own name
as Bodimeade, Bodymead or Bodimead to appear in church and manorial
records as Bodyman or Bodiment.

Origin

There are two questions usually posed about a rare surname's
origins:

Does it have a single geographical origin?

What is its derivation?

Before the mid-nineteenth century the surname Bodimeade and its
variants are largely confined to northern parts of Middlesex and
southern parts of Hertfordshire. The major concentration is in the
parishes of Harrow, Great and Little Stanmore, Bushey and Watford,
though there are Bodimeades resident in Barnet and Lewisham, and they
appear from time to time in City of London parishes and elsewhere in
Hertfordshire. The earliest entry in the Harrow Parish register is the
burial of "A child of William Bodymede of Weald" in 1664 (though the
registers only start in 1653), and their first appearance in the
Court Rolls for Harrow Manor is the admission of William Bodyman and
Mary Moale (probably just before their marriage) in 1652 (these Court
Rolls begin in the 14th century). There are Bodimeades documented in
Watford parish registers from about 1648 (the registers start in
1539)

The few pre-1650 parish register records I have in my database are
rather scattered, and mostly to Bodiman (in Kent: Canterbury (1); in
Buckinghamshire: Aylesbury (1), Upton-cum-Chalvey (4), and Iver (1); in
Middlesex: Harefield (1), and Westminster (1)) rather than Bodimeade (in
Middlesex: Uxbridge (2); in Bedfordshire: Oakley (1)). There does not
seem to be any strong pattern in these though a west Middlesex to
southeast Buckinghamshire concentration is possible. I recently
discovered some other, earlier records mentioning Bodimeades: in the
1522 Muster Rolls for Buckinghamshire in Clifton Reynes (Bodymeade) and
Iver (Bodeman); and in 1309 and 1332 Lay Subsidies for Bedfordshire in
Marston Moretaine, Cranfield, and Lidlington (Botemede, Bodymade,
Botemund). However, matters are complicated by the patchy survival of
records. At the moment the best hypothesis seems to be that the surname
Bodiman originates in southern Buckinghamshire, whilst Bodimeade coes
from northern Buckinghamshire and west-central Bedfordshire. Whether one
or both gave rise to the later Bodimeades we do not know, but it is
interesting to note that the Cranfield area has a strong tradition of
brickmaking, and the earliest documented Bodimeades in the Harrow and
Watford area are brickmakers.

Finding the derivation of the name is also difficult. Being so rare
it does not appear in any standard dictionary of surnames. Cecil
Humphrey-Smith suggested to me at a course I attended in 1984 that it is
'presumably a place-name but unidentified. Probably O[ld] E[nglish]
personal name Bud(d)a and mæd "meadow".' Buda or
Boda is an Anglo-Saxon forename meaning a messenger. I have
searched the volumes on Place-Names of Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire,
Hertfordshire, and Middlesex but found no reference to a similar name,
though it might be just a field name which was not significant enough
for these volumes. The field name Bodemead or Bode
Mead does appear in Brasted, Kent, according to papers of the
Streatfeild family catalogued in Access to Archives. This demonstrates
that such a field name can exist, though given the other geographical
information discussed above, it is unlikely to be the one from which the
family derives their name. The 1309 and 1322 forms from the Bedfordshire
Lay Subsidy are Bodymade, Botymade, Botimade, Bodmede, Botemede, and
Botemund. The preponderance of forms with 't' rather than 'd' suggests
that the personal name could originally have been Old English
Bota rather than Boda.